Loving Her: A Novel

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

LOVE TO READ?

LOVE GREAT SALES?

GET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS

DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!

Loving Her

A Novel

Ann Allen Shockley

Contents

Foreword by Alycee J. Lane

Foreword Bibliography

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

About the Author

FOREWORD

FOR BLACK LESBIANS, WRITES novelist and critic Jewelle Gomez, reading Ann Allen Shockley’s first novel, Loving Her (1974), "was like reading The Well of Loneliness for the first time as teenagers and realizing there were ‘others’ out there." Gomez’s invocation of Radclyffe Hall’s novel, published in England in 1928, is apt indeed, for The Well of Loneliness was the first novel to engage an explicitly lesbian theme. Loving Her is a groundbreaking text as well; not only is it the first African American novel written with an explicitly lesbian theme, but it is the first to feature a black lesbian as its protagonist.

Of course, the operative word here is explicitly. As critics Deborah McDowell, Gloria T. Hull, Barbara Smith, and others have shown, Loving Her does have its forerunners. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929); the poetry of Harlem Renaissance writers Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Georgia Douglass Johnson; the early poetry of Audre Lorde—all of these works are to some degree marked by an unmistakable and yet concealed homoerotics, lesbian themes played out, perhaps, in as safe a way as possible. The times in which these authors were writing did not provide the space for them to tell explicitly—if, in fact, they desired to do so—a black lesbian story. The experience of Radclyffe Hall (who was a contemporary of Larsen, Grimké, Dunbar-Nelson, and Johnson) speaks to the politically repressive conditions under which lesbians lived in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hall’s work was, upon its release, tried for obscenity in England and subsequently banned in that country; the lower courts of the United States rendered a similar decision on the novel. Only after a successful appeal was The Well of Loneliness published here, the fact of which did not, of course, end the controversy surrounding the text and the homophobic diatribes against it.

It took the Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s Liberation, New Left, and Gay Liberation movements of the 1960s and early 1970s—not to mention the groundbreaking Warren Court decisions on obscenity rendered in the late 1950s—to make the space, a very small but important space, for a text such as Loving Her. That Loving Her’s time had definitely arrived is indicated by the fact that the novel was published in the same year in which black feminists of Boston, calling themselves the Combahee River Collective, organized to fight racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression; only months after the National Black Feminist Organization held its first public meeting to address such issues as welfare, sexism within black communities, and lesbian oppression; and a year after The Black Scholar dedicated an issue to black feminist concerns.

Loving Her is the story of Renay Lee, a twenty-something musician who, after years of marriage to the abusive, alcoholic Jerome (whom she married because he impregnated her when he raped her after their date at his fraternity dance), leaves him—with their daughter Denise in tow—for Terry, a wealthy white lesbian writer. With Terry, Renay realizes that for all the years she had been with Jerome, she had been simply going through the motions of life. Now she felt alive again, living to love, loving to live.

Unlike Jerome, Terry encourages Renay’s love for music, sends her to school so that she can finish the music degree that she was pursuing before she got pregnant, and provides and cares for Denise, who, in her new environment away from Jerome, had grown more outgoing. Moreover, Terry helps Renay to face what she knew had always been there, deep within. Her Lesbianism. Terry had helped her bring it out. In so doing, Terry helped to kindle the flames of Renay’s "desire. She enjoyed sex with Terry. Now she looked forward not only to the nights but to the days. There was life in life now, and love in its moments. Renay, in turn, brings to Terry a sense of family and home. Before Renay, Terry’s life had been just a string of endless love affairs in which she gave more than she ever received. With Renay, Terry is now happier than she had ever been."

But Jerome has no intention of letting Renay go so easily. He soon discovers not only where she and Denise are living, but the nature of Renay and Terry’s relationship. Upon confronting Renay, Jerome threatens to take Denise and beats Renay so badly that she must be hospitalized. Jerome later finds that Denise is staying with Renay’s mother, and he promptly apprehends his daughter. Drunk when he takes her away, he consequently has an accident in which Denise is killed and he himself escapes unscathed. Grief-stricken, Renay leaves Terry to deal with her sorrow alone, for she feels somehow that God has punished her for loving Terry. In the end, however, Renay returns to her lover, ready to start life all over again.

Loving Her is not a stylistically successful novel, which is forgivable since it is Shockley’s first (she would follow up this work six years later with the publication of The Black and White of It, a collection of lesbian short stories, and twelve years later with her second novel, Say Jesus and Come to Me). This is not to say that the art of writing was new to Shockley; indeed, her career as a writer dates back to the 1940s, to her undergraduate years at Fisk University, where she wrote for the Fisk Herald (Shockley is now the university’s Associate Librarian for Special Collections). From then on she contributed articles and short stories to such periodicals as the Louisville Defender (published in Louisville, Kentucky, where she was born in 1927), the Afro-American, and a host of professional outlets, including Library Journal, College Library Notes, and Southeastern Librarian. Shockley also has edited such works as Living Black American Authors: A Biographical Directory and Handbook of Black Librarianship. During the 1960s and early 1970s, she contributed work to such journals as Black World, Phylon, Umbra, and Freedomways.

Nevertheless, Loving Her is marred by a number of formal weaknesses, not the least of which is Shockley’s representation of Renay and Terry’s relationship as devoid of racial tension. This lack is quite remarkable, given that Terry’s life had been solidly WASP. Before knowing Renay, Shockley writes, Terry had never been exposed to or closely associated with blacks. Shockley then gives a flimsy rationale for Terry’s racial innocence: In her white-gilded ghetto, she had been totally isolated from the ugliness of racism. Besides, her personal burden of invertedness and its stigma had been uppermost in her mind. To believe that such a white person exists is certainly to stretch one’s imagination. Granted, Shockley does provide characters who view the couple from a racist perspective. Yet racism is never a relationship issue for Renay and Terry; that is, it is never something the couple has to struggle with and fight about from time to time in order to make their relationship work in a racially polarized society.

As the above quotation shows, the novel is also strangely replete with archaic terms such as invertedness and homophile; thus, it often reads more like a work set in Radclyffe Hall’s time than one written not only in the midst of the Gay Liberation movement, but in the same year that the American Psychiatric Association struck homosexuality off its list of mental disorders. Combined with trite language like he pinned her shoulders down with his weight, trying to shove his male dagger into the secret abyss of her being, and long, ponderous sentences, such terms often make for tough reading.

These and other problems, however, do not take away from the significance of Loving Her. As Alice Walker wrote in her 1975 Ms. magazine review of the novel, its exploration of a daring subject boldly shared makes it a work of immense value. Moreover, the novel did, as Jewelle Gomez claimed, alert black lesbians to the fact that others were out there, as it also demonstrated that they, too, could write explicitly about their lives.

The consensus among the text’s critics, it seems, is that Loving Her is valuable only insofar as it is a first and puts black lesbians on the African American literary-historical map. It is also important, I would argue, because it stands among the canon of black women’s novels written during the 1970s that, as critic Madhu Dubey argues in Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, dialogize the ideological discourse of 1960s and early 1970s black nationalism. Loving Her, in other words, conducts a subtextual dialogue with black nationalist discourses on a wide range of issues; indeed, the novel often dislocates them from their original context and re-frames them in an alien fictional context. By so doing, Loving Her exposes the sexist contradictions in black nationalist utterances.

Through the character of Jerome, for example, Shockley clearly engages and critiques nationalist rhetoric on the black family and the appropriation of the black matriarchy myth. Asserting that black women not only dominate the black family but are complicit with the white power structure’s emasculation of black men, many nationalists of the 1960s and early 1970s proposed as a corrective that the black male be reinstated into his rightful role as head of the black family. In Will the Real Black Man Please Stand Up?, Nathan Hare, for example, argues:

Historically, the white oppressor has pitted male against female and, in the analysis of Frantz Fanon, forced and seduced the female to take on his values and through her emasculated and controlled the man.

This is the day of the black male, when we must take up with ever more resolve the role of liberator, and, in collaboration with the black woman, begin to transcend the role which the black woman heretofore has played as an organizer of the family, our youth, and therefore our future.

Shockley uses Jerome to expose the repressive nature of rhetoric such as Hare’s. Having established Jerome as the ruler of his household, she then constructs him as a particularly ruthless and domineering figure. When he is home, for example, Renay is expected to jump to his every command; and if she fails to carry out his wishes, she has to face his brutal beatings. Shockley also makes Jerome ventriloquize nationalist articulations of the matriarchy myth. "You know we black men have a hard enough time as it is making it in the white man’s world. … All you castrating black bitches want to keep a man down. Ruin him. Just like my mama ran my daddy away. Always after him. And you. What goddam good are you to a man? Not even a good screw!" In having Jerome speak these words, Shockley subtly equates black nationalists’ discourse with Jerome’s abusive behavior, which is to say that Jerome is, in Loving Her, the nationalist discourse incarnate.

Through her characterization of Jerome, then, Shockley argues that the (fundamentally white middle-class) family model that nationalists idealize proposes for black women not domestic bliss, but domestic violence. Moreover, it promises for black women a life of enslavement to black men, a point Shockley specifically makes in the scene in which Renay finally decides to leave Jerome:

She moved her foot tentatively across the bed to assure herself that he wasn’t there. No, he really wasn’t there. The realization drowned out the rain and caused new life to flow within her. She opened her eyes in relief. He was gone. This meant it had to be today that she would do what she should have done long ago.

She sprang up, throwing the covers back in disarray. Quickly she ran across the hall to where the little girl slept curled up with her arms over her head.

If she wouldn’t think about it—just do. Don’t think. Not one second for thought. Denise—darling—wake up! Impatiently she shook the child. We have to go away. Hurry!

In this powerful scene, Shockley clearly constructs Renay as a runaway slave. Renay doesn’t simply leave Jerome; she escapes, and under the cover of secrecy. Renay must take advantage of the slave-master’s absence; and since she is never quite sure when he might reappear, she must hurry before he returns. With just a suitcase full of her and Denise’s clothes, Renay flees to Terry’s apartment—flees, that is, to freedom.

In a particularly radical gesture, Shockley displaces onto Renay and Terry’s home the domestic bliss that nationalists imagine will define the black household once it is taken over by men. The relationship between the two women, Shockley writes, resembled that of a married couple, except that they could not proclaim themselves man and wife. This statement is necessarily ironic, for Renay and Terry’s life together hardly resembles Renay and Jerome’s marriage, which is the only one that we see in this novel. In fact, the former is based on mutual support and respect. For this reason, Renay’s life with Terry is quite liberating. For the first time in a long while, Renay was free to do what she wanted when she felt like it, not bound by a routine that had to be followed for someone else. She was free to rest as long as she wanted.

Indeed, the equity in the two women’s relationship is part of what makes the sex between Renay and Terry so good; with Terry, sex is a wonderful feeling, like that of the giver and the gift. Thus, Renay wants it in the morning, at noon and at night. She could just lie beside Terry without Terry’s touch and feel the stirring spasms of desire. Not so with Jerome. The bed was his kingdom, the womb his domain, and the penis his mojo hung with black magic. Because Jerome’s thoughts had only been of himself, Renay had never experienced an orgasm with him. After her first time with Terry, with whom she does have an orgasm, Renay proclaims, "‘I didn’t know it could be like that—’ It had never been with him. The hurried mounting of her, the jabbing inside her with the acrid whiskey odor heavy in her nostrils. It had always been over in seconds; then he would turn over and go to sleep."

By displacing onto Renay and Terry’s home the domestic bliss that nationalists idealize, Shockley revises their conceptualization of home and family and claims that it must, if it is to be viable, resemble what Renay and Terry have created. Now, this is not to say that Shockley proposes that black women simply give up black men and become lesbians, even though she doesn’t think that that would be such a bad idea. At one point, she actually appropriates the black matriarchy myth herself to suggest that becoming lesbians may be the answer: You know, Renay says to Terry, "it’s a wonder all black women aren’t in our world. They’re the ones who can get the jobs, the ones left alone to bring up the children, the ones who head the families when the man isn’t and often times is there. Black Amazons whose tallness and strength lie in their hearts and minds and wills." Shockley does argue, however, that black women who choose to be with black men deserve something better than the repressive model of home and family that nationalists offer.

Both Shockley’s representations of sex and her decision to develop an interracial lesbian relationship contest yet another nationalist claim: that homosexuality is a white thing, a product of the decadence of white culture. Shockley absolutely delights in confronting this claim, and nowhere is this clearer than in the moments when she has Renay reflect upon Terry’s white body after the two women have made love. Funny how she could love Terry so deeply that she did not see Terry’s white skin—only knew of Terry’s heart and the love in it, Shockley writes. And again:

Tracing the whiteness of Terry’s skin with her finger, Renay thought, It is amazing how I can lie here and see and feel this skin and not think of the awful things others of her color have done to us. And yet, my skin is light-tinged with the sun. Someone, somewhere in the past, must have done and thought and felt like this with another—or hated in a different and helpless way. (italics in original)

And yet again, in a more polemical passage, Shockley asserts, ‘Blackopaths’ would question her capacity to love a white. She recalled the bull sessions in the dormitory when the girls would wonder how Lena Horne and Pearl Bailey could wake up in the morning to white faces besides them. But now she knew: you can’t confine love to color or object.

These moments of reflection become occasions for Shockley to construct desire as exceeding and transcending race or, more precisely, to construct the body as forgetting race in its quest for joy. Renay, for example, doesn’t see Terry’s white skin in the moment of desire; she doesn’t think of the awful thing others of her color have done. Once the body forgets, Shockley implies, then it is capable not only of a vast range of desires, but also of desiring a vast array of objects—which means that race does not truly determine desire. In a sense, the body—Renay’s body—frees itself of limiting constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, so that the only thing that is real is how one feels. Homosexuality and homosexual desire, then, are not white, any more than an orgasm is white.

As Shockley realizes, however, race, gender, and sexuality norms can straitjacket the body and its desires. This point she drives home in her polemic on black women’s homophobia. Black women, she writes, are

…the most vehement about women loving each other. This kind of love [is] worse to them than the acts of adultery or incest, for it [is] homophile. It [is] worse than being inflicted with an incurable disease. Black women [can] be sympathetic about illegitimacy, raising the children of others, having affairs with married men—but not toward Lesbianism, which many [blame] on white women.

However, she proclaims, black women probably feel this way because of the fear bred from their deep inward potentiality for Lesbianism. Shockley implies that black women shortchange their potential for experiencing joy (and in this case, the joy of Lesbianism) and do so by keeping their bodies imprisoned within race, gender, and sexuality norms. Indeed, keeping her own body imprisoned was Renay’s downfall, the fact of which Shockley illustrates in the scene with Renay and her college roommate, Marissa. In this passage, Marissa pressures Renay into dating Jerome Lee, who has made his interest in Renay clear:

"Honey, I just can’t see how in the hell you can pass up that good-looking hunk of man. Then, angered by Renay’s silence, she sneered half-seriously, half-mockingly: You do like men, don’t you?"

For some unknown reason, Renay felt the heat rise in her body, flushing her face. Her head swam, blurring the words before her. When she replied, the voice did not sound like her own. Of course I do. Whatever gave you the idea that I didn’t?

Marissa gave a short, snorting laugh before turning over to fall asleep. Later, Renay wondered why she had bothered to answer her roommate at all.

To rid herself of Marissa’s probing, which was becoming increasingly more persistent, she relented and went with Jerome Lee to a movie. Afterward, there was a steady succession of dances, movies and beer dates.

In exchange for the social legitimacy that heterosexuality accords, Renay gives up her body’s potential for joy. At no time with Jerome could she respond or did she feel an answering spark within her … During the times of his lovemaking, she would lie there quietly, gritting her teeth, hands gripping the sides of the bed, and wait impatiently for his climax. It is only after she gets together with Terry that she realizes how much beauty had been wasted in the past. After reflecting on her years with Jerome, Renay realizes that she could never do that again, for she had found what she wanted and needed most. She was now aware of herself and the part she had tried to deny. Renay, in other words, realizes that she had denied not only her sexuality but pleasure itself.

Unfortunately, Shockley does not always trust her narrative’s capacity to undermine effectively the ideological discourses of black nationalism; consequently, she falls back on giving her characters bewildering speeches, such as the one in which Renay wonders why more black women aren’t in the life, or she herself interrupts the story to make her own speech. The result is simply weak prose, full of clichés, gross generalizations, and stereotypical constructions of black men and women. The truth is,